This uses a trick I've thought about trying for several weeks, and finally got around to doing. It turned out much better than I had expected.

After it was working the way I liked, I did a search through past obfuscations at Perlmonks to make sure nobody else had done this before. The only other submission I found which uses crypt was this one, but its method is significantly different.

One of the nice things about using crypt is that running perl -MO=Deparse on it doesn't give anything away.

(I decided to create a signature based on the idea, too, which I'll use for the first time here).

The thing that took the most time was, of course, finding words (and combinations of word fragments) which gave the appropriate crypt results, since crypt is a one-way algorithm. I was especially surprised when I found the fairly long (5-letter) string "anOTH".

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other